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Mary Violet Leontyne Price (born February 10, 1927) is an American soprano. Born and raised in Laurel, Mississippi,〔Randye Jones, ("Biographies: Leontyne Price (b. 1927)" ), Afrocentric Voices in "Classical" Music.〕 she rose to international acclaim in the 1950s and 1960s, and was one of the first African Americans to become a leading artist at the Metropolitan Opera. One critic characterized Price's voice as "vibrant", "soaring" and "a Price beyond pearls", as well as "genuinely buttery, carefully produced but firmly under control", with phrases that "took on a seductive sinuousness." ''Time'' magazine called her voice "Rich, supple and shining, it was in its prime capable of effortlessly soaring from a smoky mezzo to the pure soprano gold of a perfectly spun high C."〔 A lirico spinto (Italian for "pushed lyric") soprano, she was considered especially well suited to the roles of Giuseppe Verdi and Giacomo Puccini, as well as several in operas by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. After her retirement from the opera stage in 1985, she continued to appear in recitals and orchestral concerts until 1997. Among her many honors are the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1964), the Spingarn Medal (1965),〔("Spingarn Medal winners: 1915 to today" ), NAACP. Retrieved September 18, 2012.〕 the Kennedy Center Honors (1980), the National Medal of Arts (1985), numerous honorary degrees, and 19 Grammy Awards, 13 for operatic or song recitals, five for full operas, and a special Lifetime Achievement Award in 1989, more than any other classical singer. In October 2008, she was one of the recipients of the first Opera Honors given by the National Endowment for the Arts. ==Life and career== Leontyne Price was born in Laurel, Mississippi. Her father James worked in a lumber mill and her mother Katie was a midwife who sang in the church choir. They had waited 13 years for a child, and Leontyne became the focus of intense pride and love. Given a toy piano at the age of three, she began piano lessons with a local teacher. When she was in kindergarten, her parents traded in the family phonograph as the down payment on an upright piano. At 14, she was taken on a school trip to hear Marian Anderson sing in Jackson, an experience she later said was inspirational. In her teen years, Leontyne accompanied the "second choir" at St. Paul's Methodist Church, sang and played for the chorus at the black high school, and earned extra money by singing for funerals and civic functions. Meanwhile, she often visited the home of Alexander and Elizabeth Chisholm, an affluent white family for whom Leontyne's aunt worked as a laundress. Mrs. Chisholm encouraged the girl's early piano playing, and later noticed her extraordinary singing voice. Aiming for a teaching career, Price enrolled in the music education program at the all-black Wilberforce College in Wilberforce, Ohio. (This institution's public and private arms split in her junior year and she graduated from the publicly funded half, which became Central State University.) Her success in the glee club led to solo assignments, and she was encouraged to complete her studies in voice. She sang in the choir with another soon-to-be-famous singer, Betty Allen. With the help of the Chisholms and the famous bass Paul Robeson, who put on a benefit concert for her, she enrolled on a scholarship at the Juilliard School in New York City, where she studied with Florence Page Kimball, who would remain her principal teacher and advisor throughout the 1960s. Price is a member of Delta Sigma Theta.〔(Delta Sigma Theta celebrates centennial )〕 Her first opera performance was as Mistress Ford in a 1952 student production of Verdi's ''Falstaff''. Shortly thereafter, Virgil Thomson hired her for the revival of his all-black opera, ''Four Saints in Three Acts''. After a two-week Broadway run, ''Saints'' went to Paris. Meanwhile, she had been cast as Bess in the Blevins Davis/Robert Breen revival of George Gershwin's ''Porgy and Bess'', and returned for the opening of the national tour at the State Fair of Texas on June 9, 1952. The tour visited Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Washington, D.C., and then went on a tour of Europe, sponsored by the U.S. State Department. On the eve of the European tour, Price married the noted bass-baritone William Warfield, who was singing Porgy in the Davis-Breen production, in a ceremony at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, with many in the cast in attendance. In his memoir, ''My Music and My Life'', Warfield describes how their careers forced them apart. They were legally separated in 1967, and divorced in 1973. They had no children. At first, Price planned on a recital career, modeling herself after Anderson, tenor Roland Hayes, Warfield, and other great black concert singers. On occasional leaves from ''Porgy'', she sang new songs and song cycles by American composers, including Lou Harrison, John La Montaine, and Samuel Barber. However, her Bess proved she had the instincts and the voice for the operatic stage, and the Met itself recognized this by inviting her to sing "Summertime" at a "Met Jamboree" fund-raiser on April 6, 1953 at the Ritz Theater on Broadway. Price was therefore the first African American to sing ''with'' the Met, if not ''at'' the Met. That distinction went to Marian Anderson, who, on January 7, 1955, sang Ulrica in Verdi's ''Un ballo in maschera''. ===Emergence=== In November 1954, Price made her recital debut at New York's Town Hall with a program that featured the New York premiere of Samuel Barber's cycle "Hermit Songs", with the composer at the piano, and began her first recital tour for Columbia Artists. Then, opera reached out to her through TV. In February 1955, she sang Puccini's ''Tosca'' for the NBC Opera Theatre, under music director Peter Herman Adler, becoming the first African American to appear in a leading role in televised opera. Several NBC affiliates (not all Southern) canceled the broadcast in protest. She later performed in three other NBC broadcasts, as Pamina (1956), Madame Lidoine in Poulenc's ''Dialogues of the Carmelites'' (1957), and Donna Anna in ''Don Giovanni'' (1960). In March 1955, she was auditioned at Carnegie Hall by the Austrian conductor Herbert von Karajan, who was then touring with the Berlin Philharmonic. Impressed with her singing of "Pace, pace, mio Dio," he leapt to the stage to accompany her himself. Afterwards, he declared her "an artist of the future" and asked her management for control of her future European career. Over the next three seasons, Price crossed the U.S. to give recitals in the Community Concerts series. She also toured India (1956) and Australia (1957), under the auspices of the U.S. State Department. She sang a concert version of "Aida"—her first test of the role—at the May Festival at Ann Arbor, Michigan on May 3, 1957. Her entrance onto the grand opera stage occurred in San Francisco on September 20, 1957, singing Madame Lidoine in the U.S. premiere of the ''Dialogues of the Carmelites''. A few weeks later, Price sang her first on-stage Aida, stepping in for Italian soprano Antonietta Stella, who had suffered an appendicitis. The following May, she made her European debut, as Aida, at the Vienna Staatsoper on May 24, 1958, at Karajan's invitation and under his baton. Debuts followed at London's Royal Opera House, Covent Garden (replacing Anita Cerquetti),〔"A New Star at Covent Garden", ''The Times'', Thursday July 3, 1958, p. 5, column D.〕 and at the Arena di Verona, both as Aida. The next season she returned to Vienna to sing Aida and her first onstage Pamina in ''The Magic Flute'', repeated her Aida at Covent Garden, sang operatic scenes by R. Strauss on BBC Radio, and made her debut at the Salzburg Festival in Beethoven's ''Missa Solemnis'', under Karajan. The artistic understanding between Karajan and Price was reflected in many of her greatest early performances, in the opera house (Mozart's ''Don Giovanni'', Verdi's ''Il trovatore'' and Puccini's ''Tosca''), in the concert hall (Bach's Mass in B minor, Beethoven's ''Missa Solemnis'', Bruckner's ''Te Deum'', and the ''Requiems'' of Verdi and Mozart), as well as in the recording studio (complete recordings of ''Tosca'' and ''Carmen'', and a bestselling holiday music album ''A Christmas Offering''—all of which are available on CD). On May 21, 1960, she made her first appearance at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, again as Aida, becoming the first African American to sing a leading role in Italy's greatest opera house. (In 1958, Mattiwilda Dobbs had sung Elvira, the secondary lead soprano role in Rossini's ''L'italiana in Algeri''.) 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Leontyne Price」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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